Of course, none of this is true. Every story has a "telling" and history is a story. Historians emphasize different things--they even leave things out. They explain events in different ways and draw different relationships between events and people. The idea that history is an objective study as is science (or even CAN be) is silly.

Listen to an American and a Brit explain the causes and results of the American Revolution. They will both be totally accurate, but they'll tell very different stories. The same is true for pretty much any historical event.

EDITING history to suit an agenda would indeed be historical revisionism.....like claiming that the Third Reich only killed 'a FEW Jews'. Und das ist verboten. But asking counter-factual questions about history is NOT.

In FACT, the very question raised in the OP to this thread is a counter-factual question: what if the American Revolution had NOT happened? What if we had remained tied to Britain? Would this be a better world, or not? It is an INTERESTING counter-factual question!

There is no history written that does not do just that. There's no way to tell a story without a point of view. If you read a history book and you like what you read, and then you read another history book that makes you mad, that contradicts what the previous history book said, they can both be objectively accurate, but neither will be objective. Like everyone, you just see history that you like as "objective" and history you don't as "edited." We're all like that. Recognizing this fact is part of being a critical thinker.

History records that Harriet Tubman helped over 300 slaves to freedom. That's what history books said for decades because one historian wrote this and everyone else just quoted him. A later historian took a very careful look at records and discovered that she helped maybe 70 or so slaves to freedom, and indirectly helped another 70 or so. Records aren't precise, but a more careful accounting can only count maybe 150.

So...did she help 300+ or only 70? Is the "revisionist" history wrong simply because it came later? That wouldn't make sense.

There is no history written that does not do just that. There's no way to tell a story without a point of view. If you read a history book and you like what you read, and then you read another history book that makes you mad, that contradicts what the previous history book said, they can both be objectively accurate, but neither will be objective. Like everyone, you just see history that you like as "objective" and history you don't as "edited." We're all like that. Recognizing this fact is part of being a critical thinker.

Exactly. What Snikitz apparently does not understand is that ALL historians 'edit' history. No historian can POSSIBLY relate EVERYTHING that happened in some particular time period, in some particular area; so they HAVE to 'pick and choose' what they are going to include. INEVITABLY, some people are going to have complaints about what some historian did or did not choose to include.

For example: A few years back, the state of Texas, which has outsized influence on textbook choices in America, rejected a U.S. History textbook that was widely praised in academia for its balance and coverage of important topics in American history. What did Texas object to? They objected to one line in the book, where the authors were reporting that some 500,000 women worked as prostitutes in the Old West. They weren't objecting to the ACCURACY of this statement, because it IS accurate. No, they objected because they did not think high school juniors and seniors were capable of absorbing that kind of 'information'.

The authors of the textbook rightly REFUSED to censor their textbook, and as a consequence, millions of American high school students were deprived of an excellent textbook. Shameful, really.